Currently, there are many types of edible snacks made for human consumption that are sold in food stores, convenience stores and the like. Of these snacks, jerky has for a long time been popular due to its unique and flavorful taste along with its tough, chewy consistency. The Oxford Dictionary defines the noun ‘jerky’ as “meat that has been cured by being cut into long, thin strips and dried”.
The most popular jerky produced and sold on the market is beef jerky. Other meats are used to produce jerky and are sold on the market as turkey jerky, chicken jerky, pork jerky, venison jerky, and fish jerky. When properly produced and packaged, jerky is a shelf-stable product (having low water activity (aw) of 0.85 or less), one that does not require refrigeration and will remain edible for extended periods of time after consumer purchase.
Jerky has a unique texture and consistency, which is tough and harder to chew than other snacks and consumable foods. It is a unique and preferred snack due to the fact it takes longer to chew than most foods and the person eating it can savor the flavor and eating process longer. These attributes make jerky a highly desired snack for consuming at home, at work, while driving in the car, or during outdoor activities, such as hiking, biking and camping.
Consuming jerky requires more biting force than most other snack foods, as the person consuming it needs to bite down harder and with more force to shear the jerky food into smaller more palatable pieces in the mouth. Once it is broken down to smaller pieces in the mouth, the person may begin to start chewing the food in order to break it down so it is soft enough and small enough to be safely swallowed. The shear force required for a human to bite through foods is best simulated and measured using a TA-HD Plus Texture Analyzer Device, which is testing equipment commonly used in the food industry by food producers to determine a foods' particular hardness. This analyzer uses cutting blades to simulate the biting of the human front teeth and measures the force in grams (g), kilograms (kg), or Newtons (N) that is required to shear and cut the food being tested.
There are some beef jerky manufacturers that produce jerky pieces for sale that do not use solid strips of beef and instead use beef that has been ground into small pieces and is then extruded, formed or pressed into an exacting shape and size of jerky strips. Although it has similar jerky taste, this extruded beef jerky product has a noticeably processed texture compared to solid meat pieces used to make beef jerky, and is a less preferable form of jerky for many consumers. In the past, there have been extruded jerky-type products made with various ground meats, such as chopped beef or ground chicken and also included potato flour as part of the ingredients.
For non-meat foods, the cooked potato vegetable is a healthy food containing complex carbohydrates, natural vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber and anti-oxidants. However, unless the potatoes have first been cooked, potatoes are mainly indigestible to humans, provide little nutritional value, and people find eating them undesirable due to the raw bitter taste and very hard texture.
Cooking the potato vegetable differing ways can produce common potato foods such as baked potatoes, mashed potatoes and potato salad. Consumers and food processors use a combination of cooking and/or frying with oil to produce other common potato foods such as potato chips, French fries, and hash browns. Food processors also use a combination of cooking and dehydrating potatoes to make potato flakes, which in turn are sold to consumers for the use in making instant mashed potato products. The consumer takes the dehydrated potato flakes and reconstitutes them into mashed potatoes by adding liquid, such as water or milk, and then by a process of heating and stirring the mixture.
Other food processors have cooked and then freeze-dried potato for use in food products intended with very long term shelf-life, typically sold in sealed packages for use as rations for humans in emergencies, the military and remote camping. The consumer commonly takes the freeze-dried potato product, adds warm water to mix, and thereby reconstitutes the potato to the food processor's original cooked potato state.
Regarding taste, there are flavoring companies that specialize in replicating the tastes of beef, chicken or any other type of meat or vegetable, or that can combine many of their uniquely developed flavors and seasonings to produce new and exciting tastes. Their natural flavors are used by many of the large manufacturers for flavoring potato chip products, drinks, soups, and many of our daily foods and are added to products to get the specifically manufacturer desired taste for the products they sell to consumers.
Beef and other meats contain protein and essential minerals including iron, but also contain fat and cholesterol, which can be unhealthy for the human diet. Beef and other meat jerky are relatively expensive for consumers, due to the high cost of the meat used and the associated manufacturing costs to make it. In making jerky, some food manufacturers utilize artificial preservatives, along with chemicals including monosodium glutamate, which is a known neurotoxin and may be unhealthy for human consumption.
In recent years, consumer mistrust of food processors and manufacturers of animal-based food products, such as beef, has risen due to the use of antibiotics, growth hormones, and pink-slime type additives in the meat food, as well as manufacturer forced recalls due to contamination from dangerous bacteria or pathogens, including mad cow disease.
Inexpensive foods, such as potatoes and other vegetables, are considered healthy to eat and contain many vitamins, essential minerals and dietary fiber. However, vegetables are often not as desired for consumption as flavorful snacks because they lack the proper texture and taste when eaten raw or simply dehydrated, and lack the proper texture, taste and shape that is sought after in a beef jerky product. Also, most vegetables have a short shelf-life which may make them undesirable snacks if they have to be taken to areas for extended periods of time without proper refrigeration.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.